Our story
Two packs, one mission, thirty years
From wolf caretakers in Idaho to educators and publishers on three continents. The enclosure era ended. The work did not.
The arc
Thirty years in five chapters
1996
Founded alongside the Nez Perce reintroduction. The Sawtooth Pack becomes the first ambassador pack.
2005
The Owyhee Pack arrives — rescued from a closing facility. A second generation of education begins.
2015
The pivot. Passport to Wildlife launches: a mobile classroom, not an enclosure. We go to them.
2020
The last wolf of the Owyhee era passes. The enclosure chapter closes. The mission does not.
Today
Four active programs — the mobile classroom, the C3 Journal, the Conflict Response Unit, and the Great Predator Debate trilogy.
What the packs taught us
Living alongside a wolf pack for thirty years changes what you believe is possible. We learned that the hardest problem in carnivore conservation is not the biology — the biology is settled — but the story. The story we tell ourselves about what a predator is, and whether a landscape with teeth in it is a landscape worth living in.
That insight shaped everything we built next.
The pivot — from enclosure to field
In 2015, while the Owyhee pack were still in their prime, we made a decision that surprised our oldest supporters: we would stop being a place you visit and become a program that comes to you.
We called it Passport to Wildlife — a mobile biology classroom that now visits schools and community centers across the Pacific Northwest, bringing real skulls, real tracking data and real biologists into rooms where wolves are still mostly rumor. It is the direct descendant of the pack visits, stripped of the enclosure.
Alongside it, we launched three standing programs:
- The Conflict Response Unit (CRU) — a field team that works with ranchers, state agencies and tribal wildlife programs on non-lethal coexistence: fladry, range riders, GPS telemetry, and the uncomfortable conversations that make those tools stick.
- The C3 Journal — a monthly publication for readers who want the long version: field reports, interviews with working biologists, and the policy fights that decide whether a pack survives the year. Now read on three continents.
- The Great Predator Debate — a three-film documentary series. Two titles released, a third in post-production. A civics course disguised as wildlife cinema.
The team
Small on purpose
Core team. The rest of the bench is a rotating group of seasonal field staff, volunteer educators and a small advisory board.
Chris Anderson
Founder & Director
Has led the organization since its earliest years. A former wildlife photographer and co-producer of the Great Predator Debate series — the continuity between the Sawtooth generation and the programs we run today.
Christopher Montero
Naturalist, Author & Illustrator
A wildlife biologist who illustrates what he studies. His classroom programs bridge grade school through college, turning scientific observation into stories students remember.
Alan Lacy
Wildlife Filmmaker & Producer
An award-winning filmmaker whose camera has followed predators across three continents. He brings the field into classrooms at every level — from first graders to graduate seminars.
Chris Morgan
Wildlife Ecologist & Broadcaster
An ecologist and broadcaster who believes that falling in love with the natural world is the first step to protecting it. His work spans forests, oceans and the communities that live alongside wildlife.
For the record
What holds the work up
501(c)(3)
Registered nonprofit since the 1990s.
EIN 82-0453409
For your records or your fund administrator.
94¢ to programs
Reviewed annually, published in impact reports.
30+ years
Continuous operation — Sawtooth through P2W today.
0 retractions
Every piece we publish is edited for accuracy.
What comes next
The packs are gone. The mission they were built around is not. We spend the next decade doing three things: putting Passport to Wildlife in front of every school district that will have us, finishing the Great Predator Debate trilogy, and making the C3 journal the place a serious reader turns to first when they want to understand wild carnivores.
If that sounds like work you want a hand in, there are three ways to show up.
